Early in life, stress and anxiety tore through me in waves I couldn’t understand. It was disorienting and humbling — an experience that stripped away any illusion of control and forced me to face something I had long neglected: the simple, unavoidable fact of having a body. I came to see that when the body is ignored, life becomes unbearable; when it’s cared for and attended to, everything become workable again.

What I had thought of as purely psychological distress revealed itself as the body’s insistence on being included in my life. It was asking to be felt, listened to, and understood — something I didn’t yet have the language or tools for. Over time, that insistence became a kind of guidance. The anxiety that once felt like an adversary turned out to be a teacher, continually pushing me toward a deeper, more embodied way of understanding life.

That search eventually led me to Eastern thought, where I recognised a way of living that moves toward openness and renewal rather than the sense of terminal withering so prevalent in the West. It speaks to a life of ease — not passivity, but an ease that comes from aligning with the natural flow of things.

These ideas are now familiar in the West; they’re easy to appreciate conceptually but difficult to live. The real work lies in integration — allowing them to take root not just in thought but in the tissues, breath, and rhythms of the body itself. For me, Chinese medicine offers one of the most refined and direct ways to do that. It provides a framework through which philosophy becomes lived experience, where insight can be physically embodied.